The NHS — nothing for something ? (1977)

From the April 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The love or my life”, Barbara Castle called it, and her successors still try to tell British workers that they’re getting something for nothing.

But what are the facts? Dr. David Owen, until recently the Health Minister, says: “The NHS was launched on a fallacy. We were going to finance everything—cure the nation—and spending would drop. That fallacy has been exposed now we realise that no country, even if prepared to pay the taxes, can supply everything.”

“Supply everything”! What does it supply?

On the “free” health service a specialist consultation for a patient requested by a general practitioner has to wait for anything up to 10 months. In some places an appointment for a child with recurrent tonsillitis to see the ear, nose and throat surgeon may take 4-5 months and then, if the surgeon thinks removal of the tonsils is indicated—the wait for operation is measured not in months but in years. A middle-aged woman may have to wait as long as seven years to receive her hysterectomy.

And most of the hospitals where the operations are done are ramshackle, overcrowded and out of date. Beds are close together, operating rooms have damp-stained ceilings and peeling walls. Furniture is battered and linen thread-bare. Only 41 of Britain’s 2300 hospitals are less than 30 years old.

The sport at Oldham General Hospital among patients is taking bets on the number of cockroaches crossing the floor in a given time span. One local medical officer says: “This hospital is so permeated with the filth of the ages that the only answer is to raze it.”

One feels there should be an energetic programme to build new hospitals, but the reverse is the case. New hospitals are not being completed and existing ones being closed down. John Pilger in the Daily Mirror (25th Jan. 1977) tells us of the coming closure of the Connaught and Metropolitan Hospitals as part of the Government’s public spending cuts. Both hospitals' secretaries say that closure will mean “unimaginable suffering” for ill patients who will have to be sent home. Quote: “Mr. Peter Richardson, secretary of the Connaught, a 121-bed community hospital, which closes on Monday said last night, 'To close down now, in the middle of winter, is madness. We have a “yellow alert” at this hospital right at the moment and that means the beginning of an emergency. Many of our 100 patients are the elderly with chest infections, such as bronchial pneumonia’.”

Also from John Pilger, the Daily Mirror (26th Jan. 1977) quotes the surgeon at the impoverished Northampton hospital who pleaded: “How can I allay the fears of a woman who has to wait weeks and weeks for a breast cancer operation?” And at the Hackney General Hospital the casualty department was being forced to turn away children. The Daily Mirror continues: “Northampton and Hackney are typical of a great many British hospitals which have been starved of funds for years and are now being called upon to make cuts which are impossible without incalculable suffering and—as the doctors have said—deaths.”

But “solutions” appear to be on the way—though not very pleasant ones for the working class. Apparently the time has come for them to pay (even more) for their “free” health service. A front page headline in Medical News, 19th Jan. 1977, announces: “£2 a Day Charges for Hospital Patients would raise £300 million.” Below we read: "BMA Council believes that the Royal Commission should consider approving hotel charges for hospital patients . . . Council is recommending daily charges for bed and board in hospital, and increases in prescription charges. It believes a flat rate weekly compulsory payment for health services to be paid into an independent NHS fund should also be looked at . . . Basically the Council was unanimous in feeling that a totally free NHS at the point of consumption led to the undervaluing of the health service. Charges would impose a more thoughtful attitude on the part of the public, and also among doctors, who sometimes have no idea what the treatment they prescribe is costing.” Says Medical News: “. . . the feeling was that quite serious illness could be treated at home by a GP, and the patient there had to pay for his accommodation and food, so there was no reason why the hospital patient should not do so.”

And on the front page of Medical News 26th Jan. 1977: "Doctors Warned to Monitor Prescribing Costs —or Else.” The article reads: “If doctors do not monitor their prescribing patterns in terms of both efficacy and cost more effectively, they may have controls imposed on them.

"This is the underlying message for doctors following a report into the work of the Prescription Pricing Authority (PPA) published last week.

“The main recommendation of the report is that the work of the PPA should be computerised to speed up the processing of prescriptions and also to provide a better flow of information on prescribing patterns and costs.”

Mr. Tricker told Medical News, amongst other things: “The report makes no recommendations on the control of prescribing, and I argue for self monitoring by the doctor. However, the report does raise the question of alternative forms of control by the state if doctors seem unable to control prescribing for themselves.” Various forms of controlling prescribing were considered. Two suggestions were the exclusion of certain drugs from free treatment under the NHS, or restricting doctors’ prescribing to the BNF (British National Formulary).

Another form of control would be to introduce a local drug expenditure based on the population of an area. Funds would be allocated by the DHSS. The budget could be monitored by the local medical and “local peer group interest could be brought to bear” on a doctor. (In other words—set general practitioners to compete with each other to supply the least and cheapest treatment.)

In Doctor (10th Feb. 1977), however, we read: “Mr Ennals (Social Services Secretary) was full of praise for the prescribing standards of GPS. They were unequalled in the world, with the cost of drugs per head of population being lower in this country than elsewhere in the EEC.

“ ‘But there may still be scope for further economy (in drug costs) without harm to patients,’ he added.” Thus we learn from the boasters of the best community health service in the world that although we’re doing it the cheapest—we might still do — “better?”!

And now there are new worries for those professing to have the welfare of the sick of Britain at heart. Quote: General Practitioner, 21st Jan. 1977: “Fears Mount on Doctor Surplus. The BMA is demanding an immediate inquiry into the threat of unemployment among doctors in the early 1980s. Fears that medical schools are producing too many graduates have been highlighted by the Hospital Junior Staffs Committee after a four year investigation. The BMA is to ask for an interim report on whether these fears are justified in its evidence to the Royal Commission. The juniors believe that unless medical school places are cut immediately by 1000 a year, there will soon be too few jobs for newly qualified doctors.”

And in Medical News, of 26th January, 1977, Cyril Clarke, the retiring president of the Royal College of Physicians, has urged Britain’s 26 medical schools to consider cutting back student intake to prevent the hardship of an unemployed “bulge” later.

“The situation, he said, could not wait for the Royal Commission. It was far too urgent.”

“We must not run into a school teacher situation,” said Sir Cyril. “We should not bank on too much NHS growth.”

So, while patients wait for months for appointments, years for operations and queue up for hours in outpatients’ departments to see junior doctors who are elsewhere and working 80 hours a week, the powers that be are at pains to decrease medical manpower. Tragically—like other unenlightened workers—some junior doctors think that this is a “solution”. They fear the threat more help from an increased number of colleagues would make to their industrial bargaining power. There is, of course, and will be for a long time to come, a dreadful shortage of doctors in real terms. Apart from the dearth in existing premises there is a desperate need for them to man many vital hospitals. The trouble is that those hospitals are either not being built, or not being completed or being closed down.

The situation is similar with trained nursing sisters. They find themselves redundant whilst their colleagues desperately try to cope with endless lines of patients.

It is a “teacher situation”. Students rallied to the call for more teachers to reduce the numbers in school classes. Result—most of them out of work and still we have overcrowded classes.

And it’s all because people aren’t working hard enough, isn’t it. Mr. Callaghan? They’re not getting their backs into it and paying their way. Why don’t you leave it to the Tories to tell the working class that the trouble is they don’t like work? They’ve had (a bit) more practice at it than you have!

All this rottenness doesn’t have to plague us. There are enough men and women who want, and have the ability to be—good doctors, nurses, teachers, hospital and school-builders and organizers, to make mankind healthy, happy and secure. Only the capitalist system, which the vast majority of workers support, maintains need amidst potential plenty in every sphere of human life. Why not vote that system out of existence?

R. B. Gill

Real Men Want to Go to Iran (2006)

From the March 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

We’ll be watching the news headlines, or maybe there’ll be a news flash, and we’ll be informed that the RAF, along with the USAF’s long-range B-52 bombers, and the Israeli Air Force have carried out overnight bombing raids across Iran, targeting nuclear facilities, radar stations, airfields and anti-aircraft bases.

As in the case of Iraq, there will be the prior attempt at the mass manufacture of consent. Bush and Blair, and indeed any other European leaders who think they will have something to gain, will peddle the line about newly elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They’ll say he is another Saddam Hussein who, if Iran’s nuclear programme is not halted, will be able to lob a nuclear missile at the West in a few minutes and that Iran is supporting international terrorism, financing terrorist cells all over the world, including Al Qaeda. The case will be made that Iran is still very much a part of the axis of evil, first referred to in George W Bush’s State of the Union Address in 2002, and its people, secretly harbouring thoughts of Western-style democracy, are crying out for regime change.

Indeed, it has already started. In his January 2005 State of the Union Address, Bush said: “Iran remains the world’s primary state sponsor of terror, pursuing nuclear weapons while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and deserve.” The White House has in fact been steadily creating an anti-Iran climate in the US for some time. The Wall Street Journal (3 February) reported that “in recent polls a surprisingly large number of Americans say they would support U.S. military strikes to stop Tehran from getting the bomb.”

Both Bush and Blair have already hinted at military intervention and Israel has previously threatened Iran. The New York Times (13 January) reported Meir Dagan, the chief of the Israeli Mossad, declaring that “Israeli policy makers all agree that a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities cannot be ruled out”. The Sunday Times (11 December) had already reported that Ariel Sharon had instructed Israel’s air force to get ready for a military attack against Iran by the end of March, when Israeli elections are scheduled. Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud Party, gave notice that if Sharon did not wipe out Iran’s nuclear installations, he would see the job was done if he became prime minister in March.

A year ago it was reported that Iran was anticipating an attack by the US and that it was ready for an impressionable response within 15 minutes. For over a year Iran has been mobilising recruits into citizens’ militia and has made plans to engage in the kind of “asymmetrical” warfare that has bogged down US troops in neighbouring Iraq.

Iran has sizeable oil reserves that look quite enticing and which other countries have been eyeing up for some time. The highly regarded Oil and Gas Journal reported last year that 125.8 billion barrels of oil were in Iran just waiting to be pumped out. Iran is also the number two producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Most of Iran’s crude oil is to be found in an area known as Khuzestan, bordering Iraq and the Persian Gulf and the location of Iran’s largest untapped oil fields – Yadavaran and Azadegan. There are serious profits to be had here but, tellingly, the Chinese state oil company China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation has a 50 percent stake in the vast Yadavaran field.

Russia too has a claim in Iranian oil. Three years ago Russia decided to expand its oil procuring and distribution methods by shipping Russian crude to Iran, to be refined for domestic consumption, with Iran delivering a corresponding amount of oil to Russia, thus decreasing the cost of exports via tankers loaded at Black Sea ports and making Russian oil accessible to buyers at competitive prices.

So it’s unlikely that Russia and China will agree to a UN Security Council Resolution against Iran which could justify military action if it is thought to have been breached; for they have strong vested interests in Iran which they are desperate not to jeopardise. Not that this will bother the US in the least, as both Russia and especially China are economic powers that threaten US global ambitions, so any attack on Iran, which consequently leads to the overthrow of the present regime in Tehran, upsets the long-term ambitions of China and Russia.

Iran would be no push-over. The US would not enjoy a hasty capitulation of the Tehran regime, as was the case with Baghdad, exhausted by over a decade of perpetual bombardment and sanctions. The Iranian army comprises about 350,000 active-duty soldiers and 220,000 conscripts and you can add to this 120,000 of the elite Revolutionary Guard. The country’s navy and air force total 70,000 men. Between them, the armed forces have about 2,000 tanks, 300 combat aircraft, and three submarines, hundreds of helicopters and at least a dozen Russian-made Scud missile launchers, the kind Saddam fired at Israel during the first Gulf War of 1991. Iran also has an unknown number of Shahab missiles with a range of more than 1,500 miles. With this in mind you can begin to appreciate the remarks of John Bolton, now the US ambassador to the UN, in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq: “Real men want to go to Iran”.

True, a lot of Iran’s military hardware is old, thirty years old in some cases, and no match for the state-of-the-art weaponry the US is wont to use. Nevertheless, it is still weaponry and more than capable of delivering untold damage to US forces or any other country within striking distance of its missiles perceived as being pro-US.

With Iran controlling the Strait of Hormutz, oil tankers could easily be bombed as well tankers and platforms elsewhere in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. And Tehran could escalate any conflict, giving the nod for Lebanese Hezbollah militant attacks on Israel, sanctioning also assaults on US interests throughout Central Asia.

Oil Bourse

This month Iran intends to launch its Oil Bourse which will facilitate the future trade of oil in the euro instead of the US dollar. According to John Pilger writing in the New Statesman (13 February) this could have far-reaching consequences:

“The effect on the value of the dollar will be significant, if not, in the long term, disastrous. At present the dollar is, on paper, a worthless currency bearing the burden of a national debt exceeding $8trn and a trade deficit of more than $600bn. The cost of the Iraq adventure alone, according to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, could be $2trn. America’s military empire, with its wars and 700-plus bases and limitless intrigues, is funded by creditors in Asia, principally China. That oil is traded in dollars is critical in maintaining the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. What the Bush regime fears is not Iran’s nuclear ambitions but the effect of the world’s fourth-biggest oil producer and trader breaking the dollar monopoly. Will the world’s central banks then begin to shift their reserve holdings and, in effect, dump the dollar? Saddam Hussein was threatening to do the same when he was attacked.”

Likewise, Krassimir Petrov, Professor of Economics at the American University of Bulgaria, writing of the establishment of an Oil Bourse in the January edition of Energy Bulletin, said:

“In economic terms, this represents [a great threat] because it will allow anyone willing either to buy or to sell oil for euros to transact on the exchange, thus circumventing the US dollar altogether. Europeans will not have to buy and hold dollars in order to secure their payment for oil, but would instead pay with their own currencies. The adoption of the euro for oil transactions will provide the European currency with a reserve status that will benefit the European at the expense of the Americans … The Chinese and the Japanese will be especially eager to adopt the new exchange, because it will allow them to drastically lower their enormous dollar reserves and diversify with euros, thus protecting themselves against the depreciation of the dollar.”

Addicted to oil?

George Bush, in his January 2006 State of the Union Address made an interesting statement: “The US is addicted to oil”. That’s perhaps the truest statement Bush has ever said, but he’s mistaken if this is meant to signify that the US is going into detox and will be weaning itself off oil. At the moment there is just too much US corporate interest in the Middle East and Central Asia for the US to even think of cutting back on one barrel of oil.

Furthermore, there are dangerous competitors out there, who have an insatiable thirst for oil, so it’s important that the US has a say in who has access to the world’s oil resources. The US is not that dependent upon Middle East oil for its own domestic consumption, but is aware that one way to control its foremost economic rivals is to influence just how much oil they can have and at what price. With China a fastly growing economic, political and military power, naked aggression is a strategy the US has been and will continue to be prepared to pursue throughout the oil rich regions of the Middle East and central Asia, regardless of the cost of life and the dent to the US’s global image. The dollar needs defending, the world’s oil resources need to be controlled and military bases built. Dealing with Iran is just one move in the US game-plan to maintain its global hegemony – the real enemy is yet to be confronted.

But for now Washington will use its man at the UN, John “Real Man” Bolton, to help hype a global crisis which could consequently be used to justify attacks on Iran, with or without the blessing of the Security Council. No evidence exists as to Iranian desires to create an atomic bomb, but the country is enriching uranium – legally, as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which some pro-US nuclear states have refused to sign up to. This is the excuse that is being used to whip up support another war for oil.

John Bissett

How much longer is the Working Class going to accept this? (1976)

From the April 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most people are aware that something called “Inequality” exists in society, but have only vague ideas about how great it is and about how it has been caused. Socialists know that enormous inequalities are unavoidable symptoms of capitalism which can only be eradicated in one way: that is by the abolition of capitalism and by replacing it with Socialism, under which the wealth produced by industry and agriculture, as well as the means for producing that wealth, will belong to all the people.

Why is the need for the establishment of Socialism urgent? As an answer, let us look briefly at some of the recognized social problems: the uneven distribution of wealth, housing and homelessness, unemployment, industrial injuries and diseases, old age and retirement. The Welfare State and its reforms have been with us for thirty years and yet these social problems remain as serious as before its introduction. Just read a few items in the book Unequal Britain by Frank Field (1974). It is worth while to look at the following figures and think about what they mean.

In this country more than 25 per cent. of the wealth is in the hands of the top 1 per cent. of the population (Unequal Shares by Tony Atkinson, 1960). The top 10 per cent. own approximately 75 per cent of the wealth while, at the other extreme, more than 90 per cent, of the population have total wealth holdings of below £5,000 (each).

In terms of absolute wealth, some of the richest industrialists are Lord Thomson of the Thomson Organization, with a personal shareholding of £59.5 million, Sir Jules Thorn and Sir Charles Forte with £29.6 million and £28.9 million respectively. As a worker, whatever your employment is, how about comparing your annual income (or, perhaps, your life’s income) with the incomes of these privileged individuals:

F. S. MacFadzean (Shell)                       £75,900
Val Duncan (Rio-Tinto Zinc)                 £63,000
Sir John Davis (Rank Organization) £55,000

It is a fact that today two million families (not individuals, but families) live in homes which possess no hot water, no bath and no inside toilet.

Meanwhile, in the Daily Mirror series on injustices and privilege (1st October 1974), John Pilger reveals that Hugh Denis Charles Fitzroy, the Duke of Grafton, lives in a house with twenty bedrooms. Of course, he owns additional property and houses.

7.7 per cent. of households have no fixed bath, 7.4 per cent. have no inside toilet, while 6.1 per cent. have no hot water supply. 5 per cent. are living in officially classified “overcrowded conditions” (Labour Research Department, 1973).

On the other hand, Harry Hyams, the property speculator, owns a six-hundred-acre Wiltshire estate. In April 1973, Ravi Tikkoo, the shipping magnate, paid £500,000 for a house on Hampstead Heath (Daily Mirror, 19th April 1973).

The social problem of unemployment is striking hard at the working class, with 1,430,000 (white- collar workers and professionals, as well as blue- collar workers) out of work in December 1975.

Two-fifths of all pensioners are living on means which arc below the official Supplementary Benefit levels. From October 1973, the standard old-age pension was worth just 20 per cent. of the average male take-home pay. On the question of redundancy payments, workers who devote sizeable parts of their lives to industry receive an average redundancy payment of £328 (1972). Meanwhile, Aubrey Jones received a golden handshake of £63,000 from Laporte Ltd. and Duncan Sandys MP was given £130,000 from the Lonhro company (source: Labour Research Department).

It is these inequalities which are the symptoms of capitalism. Socialists recognize these inequalities as inevitable reflections of class ownership. This is the situation after thirty years of the Welfare State and more than a hundred years of social reform. The same inequality and the same social problems remain. We can reject completely that reformers’ red-herring of trying to redistribute wealth. Therefore, the working class (all working and employed people) must, for its own sake, reject tinkerings and tamperings with capitalism.

No, capitalism cannot be reformed in the interests of the working class. It can never be made to benefit the working class. Just looking at the history of capitalism and at capitalism today proves this point over and over again. Given that capitalism cannot be reformed to suit the interests of the workers, who are the overwhelming majority of the population, and, remembering all the misery, poverty, destruction, wastage and violence which are an inevitable consequence of capitalism, there remains the urgent task for the workers to say that they have had enough and to abolish capitalism.

Capitalism must be ended by the conscious, democratic action not merely of workers in Britain, but of workers throughout the world. When this happens, it can be guaranteed that the full potential of mankind will be released for the first time in history. The forces of nature have endowed each individual human being with a brain capable of immense creativity in innumerable different forms. For the very first time, Socialism will enable Man to use these faculties and energies to the full.

Vincent Otter

The Next War? (2011)

From the December 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Capitalism’s war drums are never silent. They are always pulsating in the background. At certain times they become more strident—now is one of those times.

Only the incurably naive believe that capitalism is possible without war. Warfare is as intrinsic to capitalism as are its prices, wages and profits. The subtext of Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor’s, warning about the collapse of the Euro that: “Nobody should believe that another half century of peace in Europe is a given — it’s not,” (Daily Telegraph 9 November) reveals that material factors such as access to markets and resources, and the protection of trade and trade routes, rather than ideological reasons are the root causes of war.

The prospect of conflict with Iran frequently makes the news. Apparently, like Iraq, they’re busy developing nuclear weapons. But Iran is also situated in a strategically important area to Western powers. On 3 November the drumming increased when the Guardian warned it had learned that: “planners expect any campaign to be predominantly waged from the air, with some naval involvement, using missiles such as the Tomahawks. . . There are no plans for a ground invasion, but “a small number of special forces” may be needed on the ground, too”. The BBC reported six days later that Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov has warned that: “Military action against Iran would be a ‘very serious mistake fraught with unpredictable consequences’ . . . His comments come after Israeli President Shimon Peres said an attack on Iran was becoming more likely”. Just to underline how volatile and dangerous capitalism is, one day later, as the BBC also reported, Leon Panetta, the US Defence Secretary, commenting on a strike against Iran, also warned that it could have “unintended consequences”.

Securing energy supplies is a basic condition for the continued existence of every nation state. The media delights in reporting the discovery of new oil fields and estimating the find in billions of barrels of oil. To put these finds in context; a billion barrels of oil will last the world at current rates of consumption—just 12 days (oilprice.com 9 November). Most studies show that existing supplies will not meet capitalism’s future needs. Thus struggles for access and control of them are inevitable.

Consequently, the drums are echoing around the Arctic region as it looks set to become the next battleground in the scramble for profits. Global warming is rapidly melting the icecaps making shipping routes more accessible and the prospect of exploration virtually certain. Time for agreements between the competing NATO members, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Greenland, the US; and Russia is diminishing. Accordingly Timeworld could report on President Putin’s speech to his political party that: “Russia intends without a doubt to expand its presence in the Arctic. We are open to dialogue with our foreign partners … but naturally, the defence of our geopolitical interests will be hard and consistent.” The next day Putin’s defence minister, Anatoly Serdyukov, announced that: “two army brigades, or up to 10,000 troops, would be deployed to defend Russia’s claims to the Arctic” (8 July).

The industrious US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta had earlier located more potential problems for capitalism. This time with another major competitor—China. The New York Times could report that: “earlier this month, Mr. Panetta was blunt about his worries. “We’re concerned about China,” he told American service members in Naples, Italy. “The most important thing we can do is to project our force into the Pacific — to have our carriers there, to have our fleet there, to be able to make very clear to China that we are going to protect international rights to be able to move across the oceans freely” (23 October).

Robert D. Kaplan’s October 2011 Foreign Policy article ‘The South China Sea is the future of conflict’ reveals why US interest in the Western Pacific and the South China Sea is so important to Washington. “More than half the world’s annual merchant fleet tonnage passes through these waters and a third of all maritime traffic. . . Roughly two-thirds of South Korea’s energy supplies, nearly 60 percent of Japan’s and Taiwan’s energy supplies, and about 80 percent of China’s crude-oil imports come through the South China Sea. What’s more, the South China Sea has proven oil reserves of seven billion barrels and an estimated 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas”. Nine states whose land-mass borders the South China Sea are laying claim to all, or some of it. All nine are dependent on Washington for diplomatic and military support.

The war drums were at their most raucous when The Global Times, published under the authority of the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party, printed the headline “The time to use force has arrived in the South China Sea; Let’s wage wars on the Philippines and Vietnam to prevent more wars.” It went on to stress that: “The South China Sea is the best place for China to wage wars. Of the more than 1,000 oil rigs there, none belongs to China; of the four airfields in the Spratly Islands, none belongs to China; once a war is declared, the South China Sea will be a sea of fire” (UPI, 3 October).

Noam Chomsky has drawn attention to the construction of a US military base on Jeju Island, 50 miles southeast of South Korea’s mainland which will “host up to 20 American and South Korean warships, including submarines, aircraft carriers and destroyers, several of which would be fitted with the Aegis ballistic-missile defence system”. He goes on to add that: “Not surprisingly, China sees the base as a threat to its national security. At the very least, the base is likely to trigger confrontation and an arms race between South Korea and China, with the US almost inevitably involved” (Truthout 7 October).

China, over the last decade, has been making major inroads into East Africa. And it isn’t just the prospect of cheap, unorganised labour that attracted them. UPI reported on 10 March last year that: “East Africa is emerging as the next oil boom following a big strike in Uganda’s Lake Albert Basin. Other oil and natural gas reserves have been found in Tanzania and Mozambique and exploration is under way in Ethiopia and even war-torn Somalia”. It is: “the last real high-potential area in the world that hasn’t been fully explored”.     However, the Economist could warn just 21 days later that: “several jealous Western governments and companies want to stall China’s advance into the Congo basin, with its vast reserves of minerals and timber”.

John Pilger writing in the New Statesman about President Obama’s “humanitarian mission” to go to the aid of the Ugandan government in its battle to defeat the “fewer than 400 fighters” of the Lord’s resistance Army (LRA) by sending in 100 US combat troops argued that: “WikiLeaks cables and the US National Strategy for Counter-terrorism show, American plans for Africa are part of a global design in which 60,000 special forces, including death squads, operate in 75 countries. As the then defence secretary Dick Cheney pointed out in the 1990s, America simply wants to rule the world” (20 October). Perhaps Pilger could have added—through the control of its natural resources.

Many writers have seen China as the emergent heir to America’s crown. The BBC reported that the building of “aircraft carriers, high-speed trains, anti-satellite systems and so on is not just for any intrinsic value they possess, but because the Communist Party leadership see them as symbols that distinguish great powers from their competitors” and that the manned space programme “and its successors are for China, symbolic proof that China is emerging as a 21st Century superpower” (29 September).

In 1957 the Chinese Communist Party Secretary General, Deng Xiaoping, described the initial steps to becoming a superpower. “The Soviet Union has the atom bomb. Where does the significance lie? It lies in the fact that the imperialists are afraid of it. Are the imperialists afraid of us? I think not . . . The United States stations its troops on Taiwan because we have no atom bombs or guided missiles” (Nuclear Weapons Databook, p. 327). Once acquired what do you do with them? A Financial Times (14 July, 2005) report gives you an idea of what the military mind thinks: “Major General Zhu Chenghu, Commandant and Professor at the College of Defence Studies at China’s National Defence University, points out that the US has designated nuclear targets east of Xian. In the event of a war breaking out between China and the US over Taiwan, he has told foreign visitors on two occasions in 2005 that: ‘We will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all the cities East of Xian.’ He also reminded his audience of China’s nuclear targeting capacity on US cities.”

Ask most people about the prospect of nuclear war and they would dismiss the idea. Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have barely touched most western people. War has become remote done by others that are feted and paraded as heroes by the media. As Malcolm X once said: “If you’re not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing.” Libya was sold to people as a “humanitarian mission”. Aristotle’s: “We make war that we may live in peace“, written 2300 years ago, still comes in handy today. Perhaps the words of someone who has experienced war is the most relevant end to an article about war.

On 11 November Ross Caputi, a Marine Corps veteran of the second siege of Fallujah related his “Thoughts on the role of veterans in the Occupy movement” through the Information Clearing House:

 “I did not serve my country in Iraq; I served the 1%. It was on their behalf that I helped lay siege to Fallujah, helped kill thousands of civilians, helped displace hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and helped destroy an entire city. My ‘service’ served Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, and other multinational corporations in Iraq”.

Ross Caputi is actively engaged in seeking an end to war. Are you?

Andy Matthews

Poverty Anonymous (1975)

From the December 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

If it would be wrong to say that poverty is an old friend of the working class, it is certainly a companion from the womb onward.

It is an ignorant delusion to believe that poverty is abolished during booms and times of so-called full employment, and only returns from banishment when there is a slump and unemployment. All the conditions of hardship, misery and deprivation, which are currently receiving so much media coverage, are there all the time. A slump simply makes them more widespread and sharpens the degree of suffering.

Poverty is an inherent part of class society. Under capitalism, the means of wealth production are concentrated into the hands of a minority class, or their state machine (which comes to the same thing). Wealth, the goods and services of society, is produced for sale with a view to profit. The vast majority are employees. By definition, they are propertyless. They must sell their working abilities for wages in order to live. They spend their lives as appendages to the factories, offices, mines and machinery owned by those who employ them. They are hired and fired at the dictate of the world market and the profit margin. They are alienated from life in any meaningful sense of the word. The wealth they are able to obtain, either through wages (if employed) or so-called Social Security (if unemployed or sick) is generally enough to keep them in working order and maintain themselves and families between pay-days.

That there are many workers in “better” paid jobs, who think of themselves as middle-class, in no way changes the basic situation. In fact it often accentuates it.

Poverty leaves a terrible imprint upon all who suffer it. Not only in the physical struggle to get by, but even worse are its mutilating effects on the personality and the mind. There is nothing so brutally pathetic, as a worker with a job who counts his “prosperity” in terms of hard work and rails against other workers who live on social security, without working. Poverty of the mind can be seen in the acceptance by most workers of the perverse ideology of their capitalist masters. It is this which anchors them to capitalism so that the whole ridiculous set-up keeps going.

It is not uncommon to hear workers in this country argue that if places like India, and other starving areas in the world, were brought up to the standard of living in Western Europe “we” would have to make sacrifices. This reflects the capitalist ideology, in that it glibly looks to solutions within capitalism. Whilst it is true that poverty is a relative thing and that the degree of poverty among workers in most of western Europe is not so extreme as that of many people in India, this becomes a convenient argument in favour of workers here being content with their lot.

The real perspective in which to see the issue, is in terms of the technological capacity for world abundance, as against the inhuman, profit-motivated performance of capitalism with its vast wastefulness and destruction (no less so in India). Capitalism subjects modern technology to the strait-jacket of the market. Over-population is one of the absurd myths that help to make capitalism seem plausible. It is sheer humbug to talk of over-population in a system which destroys vast amounts of food each year, or simply does not produce it. As we write, the Daily Mail (20th October 1975) carries a story of nearly a quarter of a million tons of apples destined for destruction, because

 . . . the cost of shipping them to the hungry millions in Asia would be far more than their value.

Nowhere in the world are there any wealthy people starving. But even in the wealthiest countries there are poor people who go hungry.

John Pilger, the well-known and widely-travelled journalist, has seen poverty in many parts of the world. On 28th February 1975 the Daily Mirror carried a report he sent from Detroit. After a brief reference to the American Dream and Henry Ford’s promise to make the workers rich, the report gets down to the ugly realities of capitalism.

At the time of the report there were more than 8,000,000 Americans unemployed. In Detroit, the car industry was at a standstill with 26 per cent, (officially) unemployed. A young unemployed worker who was interviewed said:

  Guys who thought they had it made are now getting a taste of what the poor and the blacks have always had. I’ll say this; when the supplement runs out it won’t be only the blacks who’ll be picking up a brick to get some food.

Government food stamps are regarded as “the badge of poverty”. There are 37 million Americans who qualify. Pilger details a picture of abject poverty. He says:

  In the last three months since the lay-offs began in earnest, the Detroit Health Department has reported 150,000 cases of malnutrition, mostly among women and children.

And further:

  The same food which Washington sends to the starving of India is being sent to the heartland of American industrial wealth: and incredibly, people get this food with a medical prescription marked, in large type, MALNUTRITION.

Six months later, Pilger was in Liverpool and another report appeared in the Daily Mirror (14th August 1975). He interviewed a family who live in a three-year-old block of council “barracks”, where damp has destroyed lino, bedding and clothing. The rent for this unhealthy hole was £9.45 weekly. The breadwinner was unemployed. They were £50 in arrears of rent and had been threatened with eviction. The father, who is up at first light every day following up job ads, said: “Watching my kids pushing down bread and marge just to stop hunger pains is the greatest humiliation.” They were told by those champions of the needy, the so-called Social Security: “You should be more thrifty, you should be less wasteful.”

Pilger goes on to cite a report by the Child Poverty Action Group, showing that 5,000,000 people (in Britain) were spending as little as £1.60 per head each week on food, and this was diminishing. This was at a time when the average amount was £3.46. The penalty for two people being unemployed or sick in July 1974 was to be condemned by the Welfare-State to live on a pittance of 29 per cent. of average earnings. By November this year, it is expected to fall to 27 per cent.

Pilger slates Wilson and Healey, and calls them “jugglers and manipulators”. He says they “have lost all grasp of what is happening to millions of people in this country”. People who buy above-average amounts of baked beans and margarine and less than half the average amounts of butter, meat and fish. People who under a Labour government suffer hunger and among whose children rickets is returning.

Pilger, like the Daily Mirror and the media as a whole, comes to no conclusion. He lamely poses the question: "Where have all the radicals gone?” The “radicals” are those do-gooder reformists who built that supreme political irrelevance the Labour Party. Which, with the support of the Daily Mirror, is currently running British capitalism. The radicals, who were going to “tax the rich out of existence” a generation ago, seem resigned to the “compromise” of starving the poor out of existence. The Labour Party has long been stripped of any pretence of being other than a capitalist party.

Capitalism mocks all who try to tame it. The very morning the Daily Mirror announced 1,000,000 unemployed (25th July 1975) it carried a front page story about the Kleenex tycoon’s wife Roberta Kimberley, who filed a claim for expenses in her divorce case, which included £1,000 per month for food and £300 per month for flowers. Meanwhile, back on the other side of the class jungle, the nationalized (state-capitalist) gas and electricity authorities, with the aid of energy-man Benn, were making various ludicrous suggestions as to how the poor might be enabled to pay their ever-rising gas and electricity bills.

Determined as ever not to learn from history, the “Communist” party, IS, the WRP, the “bad boys” in the Labour party and the trade unions, are busily drumming up the schemes of the moment and proffering useless advice to the government on how to run capitalism — without crises. Poverty, despite all the schemes of the “left” and generations of reform legislation, is as virulent as ever. Socialists have never been deluded that it would be otherwise.

Harry Baldwin

Film Review: ‘Utopia’ by John Pilger (2014)

Film Review from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Utopia by John Pilger

John Pilger’s recent film Utopia about the Aboriginal ‘Nation’ (the ‘First Australians’) is an emotional and unrelenting look at ‘apartheid’ in Australia today with graphic footage of police tasering and brutalising young black Australian men in custody. The shocking racism in modern Australia is in stark contrast to the sympathetic and positive portrayal of the Aborigines in such films as Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout and Wim Wenders Until the End of the World.

Pilger identifies the huge inequality between the rich whites and poor Aborigines by contrasting the affluent suburb of Barton in Canberra with the township of Utopia 200 km from Alice Springs in the Northern Territory which is home to the ‘First Australians’ . Barton was named after Australia’s first Prime Minister Edmund Barton who declared in 1901 ‘The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to [apply to] those not British and white-skinned.’ The Aboriginal peoples live with sub-standard sanitation, shelter, public transport, water, light, and serious eye disease in children, and one third of Aboriginal people die before the age of 45. Pilger states that ‘Black Australians are the most imprisoned people on earth’. He recounts how in Western Australia in 2008 an Aborigine man ‘cooked to death’ in a police van, how a new all-Aboriginal prison is being built and how the treatment of the Aborigines is a ‘punishing of the poor, a punishing of indigenous difference.’

Pilger identifies capitalism as the major factor in the racist brutalisation of the First Australians. The Aboriginal Land Rights movement was subjected to a vicious TV campaign funded by the Mining companies and would lead eventually to Prime Minister Bob Hawke dropping Land Rights legislation. Mining capitalist Lang Hancock stated ‘Nothing should be sacred from mining whether it’s your ground, my ground, the black fellow’s ground or anybody else’s. So the question of Aboriginal Land Rights and things of this nature shouldn’t exist’. Pilger shows a 1984 television interview where Hancock advocates the sterilisation of Aborigine people.

Pilger discusses the 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response known as ‘The Intervention’ where on the pretext that there were widespread paedophile gangs operating in Aboriginal communities, the Australian Federal Government sent troops in, suspended the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act and introduced ‘special measures’, and there was ‘compulsory acquisition of townships currently held under the title provisions of the Native Title Act.’ The ‘Intervention’ was a Trojan Horse in order that the Federal Government could regain control over disputed land and then grant mining concessions to the capitalist class. In the same period the mining capitalists ensured the Federal Government’s Mineral Resource Rent Tax would not take too much of their profits, in fact the Mining companies saved 60 billion Australian dollars. The United Nations said that ‘the Intervention’ was racially discriminating and infringed the human rights of aboriginal peoples.

Pilger believes there is a beacon of hope by concluding with the ‘hidden history of aboriginal resistance’ with accounts of the 1966 Gurindji strike at Wave Hill and the 1973 cotton chippers strike at Wee Waa. Utopia is a grim catalogue of crimes against a people but when it comes to the insatiable lust for profit in the mining of bauxite, iron ore, and uranium nothing can stand in the way of capitalism.

The Aboriginal people believe the earth and people are one but capitalism cannot understand such a concept. Only socialism can realise the Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ when ‘the earth is made a common treasury’ for all peoples.

Steve Clayton

Sanctions: Waging war without bullets (2019)

From the March 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Western powers promote sanctions as an alternative to war, holding that if sanctions can impose costs that exceed the benefits of objectionable policies of another country, there will be a change of those policies and if the targeted government declines to change, the affected population will protest, forcing their government to change. Economic sanctions are viewed as a useful tool to apply pressure on another country to mend its ways or as a punitive measure for its behaviour which avoids outright war. No matter how devastating the detrimental effects on the economy and the civilian population, sanctions are not as successful as claimed in achieving its objectives.

Who now recalls the cost on ordinary people of the UN-imposed sanctions against Saddam’s Iraq? Who remembers when the then US Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, was asked, ‘We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?’ Albright answered, ‘we think the price is worth it’. The half million figure has since been judged as inflated but at the time it was seen as a credible figure.

Denis Halliday, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator, resigned after a 34-year career explaining he no longer wished ‘to be identified with a United Nations that is… maintaining a sanctions programme …which kills and maims people through chronic malnutrition… and continues this programme knowingly’, saying ‘I don’t want to administer a programme that satisfies the definition of genocide’. Halliday’s successor, Hans von Sponeck, subsequently also resigned in protest, calling the effects of the sanctions a ‘true human tragedy’. The resignation of Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Program in Iraq, soon followed, stating, ‘I fully support what Mr von Sponeck was saying. It is a true humanitarian tragedy what is happening here and I believe any human being who looks at the facts and the impact of the sanctions on the population will not deny that he is right.’ Agam Hasmy, Malaysia’s UN Ambassador, remarked at the UN Security Council in 2000 ‘How ironic is it that the same policy that is supposed to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction has itself become a weapon of mass destruction!’ Throughout history, starvation and disease have killed more people than all other weapons of war.

Too often sanctions are applied to soften up a foe and is a precursor of war. Sanctions can even be used as a justification for war such as when Tony Blair, in his testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry, argued that ending the sanctions was one of the benefits of the war.

Economic warfare has been part and parcel of conflicts since time immemorial with city sieges and naval blockades. We can date economic sanctions back at least to the Megarian decree of Athens in 435 BC, before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. But later we had the Napoleonic Wars, the World Wars, the American long-enforced trade embargo on Cuba and the anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa. Presently there are sanctions against North Korea, Iran and Venezuela. This article is not concerned about bans on financial transactions of named individuals but those that inflict suffering on the general population. Sanctions are viewed as an instrument of diplomacy, designed to pressure and to undermine a ruling regime. The purpose of sanctions is to cause a breakdown in the fabric of civil society.

On 23 March 2018, the Human Rights Council condemned unilateral coercive measures by a vote of 28 in favour, 15 against and 3 abstentions, because economic sanctions created economic crises, disrupted the production and distribution of food and medicine, and resulted in refugees.

Alfred De Zayas, a former secretary of the UN Human Rights Council, has said ‘Sanctions kill’ and that they fall most heavily on the poorest people. ‘Modern-day economic sanctions and blockades are comparable with medieval sieges of towns with the intention of forcing them to surrender. Twenty-first-century sanctions attempt to bring not just a town, but sovereign countries to their knees. A difference, perhaps, is that twenty-first-century sanctions are accompanied by the manipulation of public opinion through “fake news”, aggressive public relations and a pseudo-human rights rhetoric so as to give the impression that a human rights “end” justifies the criminal means’ (LINK).

Siege economy

John Pilger’s conclusion was that the sanctions were ‘One of the greatest acts of aggression: the medieval siege of Iraq.’

Patrick Cockburn wrote on the sanctions affecting Syria: ‘Economic sanctions are like a medieval siege but with a modern PR apparatus attached to justify what is being done. A difference is that such sieges used to be directed at starving out a single town or city while now they are aimed at squeezing whole countries into submission. An attraction for politicians is that sanctions can be sold to the public, though of course not to people at the receiving end, as more humane than military action. There is usually a pretence that foodstuffs and medical equipment are being allowed through freely and no mention is made of the financial and other regulatory obstacles making it impossible to deliver them’ (LINK).

The difficulty in processing SWIFT transactions, the banking system’s clearing house for international money transfers, has hindered the import of medicines and other necessities so many of the biggest pharmaceutical companies refuse to do business with the country.

The Spanish economist Alfredo Serrano, head of the Centro Estratégico Latinoamericano de Geopolítica, drew attention to the reluctance of banks to process Venezuelan international transactions, creating an obstacle in obtaining insulin and other medicines such as anti-retroviral and anti-malaria drugs.

The Lancet medical journal reported in July 2018 that sanctions against Iran jeopardised cancer patients and cancer research.

Sanctions have a snowballing effect. Foreign businesses, fearing they might unknowingly cross a line into impermissible activities, prefer to shy away even from authorised trade. Transaction costs particularly related to food and medicine escalate, while access to foreign currency to trade has diminished. Sanctions lead to unprecedented levels of inflation and spikes in the price of basic goods like milk and vegetable oil.

Sanctions can and do kill the innocent. Sanctions rarely harm the decision-makers but have caused extreme hardship to those who are the weakest, the most vulnerable and the least political. Members of the elite with greatest access to government privileges are best positioned to survive and can even thrive. Under the sanctions, there are those who are savvy enough to exploit others’ deprivation for a profit. They function as middlemen and brokers becoming wealthy. Smuggling and clandestine networks arise and result in a shadow economy in which corrupt officials are fully complicit.

Between 1945 and 1990, the UN had imposed sanctions only twice but now sanctions are being imposed with increasing frequency, with the United States either the key player in instigating them or taking the initiative by imposing its own sanctions unilaterally. The United States uses its global economic power as leverage to pressure other nations into compliance with its sanction policies. The United States has the sovereign right to refuse to enter into commerce with other states, but not to exercise pressure on third-party states in order to harm their targets, and attempting to do this is a violation of the United Nations Charter. But as always ‘might is right.’

Obvious Vengeyi from the University of Zimbabwe makes a direct comparison with siege warfare:

  ‘The desperate conditions that the besieged populations of Samaria and Jerusalem were exposed to are similar to what Zimbabweans experienced as a result of sanctions… Similar to the sieges of Samaria and Jerusalem therefore, the Western siege of Zimbabwe through economic sanctions affected the ordinary people more than the so-called targeted individuals… As the military siege on Samaria and Jerusalem, Western sanctions were imposed on the ordinary people of Zimbabwe. The intention was to starve the ordinary people of Zimbabwe in order for them to vote out the ruling party… The logic was to incapacitate the state to provide basic services to the ordinary people in order to instigate a revolt against the government… As observed with ancient Near Eastern military strategy of siege, this is usually the intention of the besieging aggressor; to create tensions in the besieged society in order to weaken it’.

Collective sanctions

There exists a glaring anomaly. It is illegal in war-time, a violation of the Geneva Convention e.g. the 1977 Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions prohibit any wartime measure that has the effect of depriving a civilian population of objects indispensable to its survival; Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians in wartime, for example, prohibits ‘collective penalties’. Yet under peace-time conditions economic sanctions are perfectly valid. Economic sanctions inflict collective punishment upon ordinary people when they have no connection to or control over the actions of the government whose actions have led to them being punished. Sanctions are inherently anti-humanitarian. As in siege warfare, it is the population and those least responsible for the state’s action – children, the elderly, the sick – who bear the worst consequences. When countries are called ‘rogue states’ or ‘the axis of evil’, Western countries proceed to put economic sanctions on them. But the victims are invariably the common people and not the ruling dictator they have been complaining about – whether it was Saddam Hussein then or Assad or Kim Jong-Un now.

Economic sanctions imposed on authoritarian regimes often fail to bring about the political change they are meant to create even though the people had to bear the pain of sanctions.

Lee Jones, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, stated that according to the accepted figure, sanctions succeed in about one third of instances. But a political scientist, Robert Pape, looked at these figures and argued that often the outcome was not caused by sanctions; it was caused instead by domestic insurgencies or by military threats, and if you take away those cases, then sanctions only succeed in fewer than 5 percent of cases. The ‘success’ story of South Africa is often cited to show that sanctions can work yet many commentators have suggested that the end of apartheid was due to internal political movements as much as to international sanctions. Politicians employ economic sanctions despite the evidence that they do not work – simply because the cost of military action is too high a price to pay. Cheaper to incite the civil population to revolt by driving them to take desperate measures.

It is generally accepted that you should not be a judge in your own case; that the law must be clearly stated, and consistently applied; that individuals can only be punished for their acts, not their nature or their potential acts. However, states interpret and impose the law as they wish, without restraint. This means that a whole population is harmed with the approval of ‘international law’. Sanctions imposed on a whole nation share all the characteristics of siege warfare such as blurring the distinction between the battlefield and by-standers, engulfing civilians in the violence of war through the destruction of society’s infrastructure. Those who defend sanctions share the same belief as a kidnapper who refuses food and water to his victim because the victim’s family declines to pay the ransom demand. The siege tactic  deliberately targets a civilian population with fatal consequences by withholding supplies and starving them yet it is a form of warfare which is considered legal and acceptable.

ALJO

Between the Lines: Forbidden moments (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

FORBIDDEN MOMENTS

Under capitalism the best things are forbidden. Access to the best things in life are denied to most of us because of lack of money. Other things are removed from us by the forbidding state. News and information, plays and films, jokes and songs: any of these images of life can be censored if they are considered liable to disturb the passivity of the wage slaves' minds. The Banned season on Channel Four has shown a number of programmes previously censored for TV audiences and has produced some first class discussion on the theme of censorship in its many forms. It has been a revealing few weeks of TV. Pathetic little voyeurs, hoping for a bit of naked flesh in their living rooms, will have been disappointed by the Banned season; the majority of censored TV is denied to viewers on grounds that to show it would be politically insensitive. The ruling class can live happily with the daily Page Three, but when it comes to exposing scrutiny of its precious, oppressive values it is time to pull the plugs.

The Truth About Lies (C4, 9pm, Monday, 8 April) offered a valuable survey of how the British ruling class has used censorship to keep workers in the dark. It documented how the BBC was used to attack the 1926 strikers, to serve as an appendage to military propaganda in the Second World War, to ban numerous programmes about the Army's current operations in Ireland, and to prevent life and death information — such as the coming of US Cruise missiles to British soil — from being communicated to the public. The liars who rule Britain came across as very scared people. They are afraid that the workers might see too much of what they are up to. They forbid speech on certain mailers because they know that they could not win the argument if they discussed them openly. In short, they confirm the socialist claim that when the working class understand what is going on in society it will be an explosively and unstoppably potent force.

John Pilger's excellent Frontline - The Search For Truth In Wartime (C4, 8pm, Saturday, 13 April) presented a survey of how TV coverage has been used to drive the millions into the frenzy of war fever. Pilger, whose own journalistic standards are in marked contrast to most of his cringeing, knee-bending colleagues, showed how war reporters, from Vietnam to the Gulf, have simply served the propaganda needs of the militarists who gave them the briefings.

News is not the only victim of the censors. Numerous films and plays have been censored from TV audiences. For years The War Game, which was commissioned by the BBC, was banned from being shown on the grounds that it depicted loo realistically what the effects of a nuclear bomb would be. In the late 1970s the BBC commissioned a play on the legalised brutality of the borstal system: the play Scum, was banned from being shown to us until it appeared in the Banned season (C4. 10.30pm. Sunday, 14 April). Even comedy has been the victim of the censor. No TV station would show Monty Python's Life of Brian (C4, 10.30pm, Tuesday, 16 April) and in several British cities local government outlawed the showing of the film which superbly sends up the myths of Christianity. Only Joking? (C4, 11pm, Friday, 12 April) was about comedy and the limits of "public taste". To be sure, there are lots of comedians, notably in the current US "comedy of hate" vogue, whose unfunny racist rambling! can appeal to to those with Sun-reader mentalities. The documentary showed a performance by a racist creep called The Dice Man whose New Year's Eve show in the USA attracted an audience of 17 million cable viewers. But who needs the state to tell us what is unacceptably unfunny? If we are unamused by Bernard Manning or Gerry Sadowitz, then we need not watch them. The price of any kind of free speech is that you cannot set up a dogma called Good Taste and then ban those who transgress it. The alternative price to be paid was well illustrated in two documentaries about Christian bigots and their efforts to "clean up" (for which read censor) TV output: Damned in the USA (C4. 10.30pm, Sunday, 14 April) and Dancing With the Devil (C4, 11pm, Friday, 19 April). When the superbly produced Thirtysomething showed a scene with two male lovers in bed together fifteen major advertisers pulled their money out of the network making the programme, resulting in millions of lost dollars as a result of the homophobic bigotry of a handful of rich marketing directors. Under capitalism it is these people who decide what is good for us to see.

Socialists oppose censorship. Ironically, C4's Banned season was itself censored: in the hitherto unshown Mother Ireland the voice of the IRA woman shot by the British troops in Gibraltar had to be dubbed over by an actress lest we be contaminated by her authentic voice; a Yugoslav film-documentary about Wilhelm Reich had to be changed so that the male genitals in it could not be seen by the highly-corruptible late-night audience.

A more significant irony was that C4 did not once in its season give any consideration to the ultimate ban which it seems to find quite compatible with its own liberal values: the ban on serious TV exposure to those ideas which are considered "way out" or "utopian". In short, the ban which we socialists have experienced when trying to obtain more than a two-minute chance to explain our ideas on Channel Four. Perhaps now is a good lime for the C4 gang to ask where they draw the line. And why. And who might lose their jobs if the boundaries were redrawn.

THE LONGER VIEW

You can never be depressed in the company of a geologist. Why hasn't socialism been established after all these years? After all what years? Clive James interviewed Stephen Jay Gould, the eminent and very worth reading Harvard palaeontologist (BBC2, 6pm, Sunday, 7 April). "What would happen if a nuclear holocaust destroyed the whale of human life?" asked James. It has happened before, responded Gould — in fact, there have been three wipe-outs of life over the past 260 million years. "We'd just have to wait a few million years and it would all start again" replied Gould. And the struggle for socialism is hardly a century old. Come to think of it, when they banned The Life of Brian less than twenty years ago the censor probably thought that it would never ever be shown - the fools.

Steve Coleman

Choosing which evil? (1996)

From the December 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some people never learn. They cherish the most absurd hopes, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Some Labour supporters imagine that things will get much better for them under a Labour government. Maybe they will get a little better. For many groups—the unemployed, the low paid, the retired, the sick relying on a crumbling health service—they can hardly get worse. But don’t count on it.

At every election, including the one coming up, the Socialist Party has had to contend with those “socialists” who are convinced that, though Labour isn’t perfect, it represents the best way forward for the working man and woman. Confronted with the socialist case against all administrations of capitalism, such people argue that you should choose the lesser of two evils. Which is the lesser evil today? Because of the relentless move of both major parties to the centre, in a desperate bid to get votes, giving an answer to that question is more difficult today than at any previous election.

Labour’s status quo

Something might be said for choosing the lesser of two evils if one is markedly less evil than the other, and if you feel that by so choosing you can help to bring nearer the kind of world you really want. I remember feeling that way in the late 1940s when labour had introduced “socialist” measures such as the National Health Service. These, I and many others thought at the time, were steps in the right direction. If there were enough of them, we would eventually have socialism.

We were wrong, of course. Despite the short-term attractions of reforms, Labour had to run the system in the only way it can be run: in the interests of capital. Without majority socialist understanding, the profit system is the real world. 

Because of New labour’s persistent drive away from being the party of labour and towards claiming to be the best party to administer the status quo, it is now very hard for Labour supporters to maintain the “lesser of two evils” argument. The discovery of more-than-trivial differences between Labour and Tory policies requires increasing powers of detection.

Taboo at Blackpool

The always-provocative John Pilger wrote a challenging piece under the discursive title The taboo subject at Blackpool was that a Blair government is quite likely to be nastier and a greater threat to democracy than the Tories (New Statesman, 11 October). The piece was worth reading, not because it puts the case for socialism (it doesn’t) but because it implicitly puts the case against the policies of the party most often traditionally thought of by working people as the lesser of two evils. Here are some extracts:

   “In Bolton I met Janice, aged 20, who lives alone with her baby in a damp dangerous place. The few jobs that come up pay less than the cost of childcare; she has tried them all. She shares teabags with girlfriends. Last week she ate nothing but baked beans. From Blackpool, Gordon Brown offered her prudence and discipline. . .
   When Doreen MacNally, a docker’s wife, went to Blackpool last week, hoping to explain to the conference the importance of the dockers’ struggle in opposing the spread of casual, cheap labour all over the country, she was prevented from speaking . . .
   Instead of regulating rampant markets, Blair leaves no doubt that he will regulate people. He will reform welfare . . .  Too many people go on benefit to stay there, said Blair in Singapore, having just expressed his admiration for Lee Kuan Yew. The likes of Janice will not stand a chance."
   “Under Labour there is no suggestion that MI5 and the police will be deterred from continuing their shoot-to-kill policy. There is no question that the war industry and arms trade developed by Thatcher will continue to be subsidised from taxes.”

It’s a pity Pilger didn’t go on to draw conclusions from this sorry saga. He could have said that changing one set of leaders for another to run capitalism is just wasted effort. He could have said that it’s the basic nature of the profit system that causes the problems and the human miseries, not the individuals elected to run it. He could have said that the sensible thing to do is to get rid of the present system and replace it by socialism. He could have said that the only way to do this is to organise democratically for such a change, in a party that has the establishment of socialism as its sole object.

He didn’t say those things. So we say them.

Stan Parker

The Monday Club Tories (1971)

From the June 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Few things so ill become the ruling class as the way they believe their own propaganda myths about their position and importance in society. They have put it about that business banquets and board meetings are indispensable to the production of food, clothing, shelter and the other amenities of life.

Some of the more weird aberrations of some of our masters were described in a series of article by John Pilger in the Daily Mirror during March. We were informed that:

With a Tory government in power and the unions in revolt, the old conflicts of class in Britain have begun anew. But in 1971 the Class War is not what it seems.

It would be interesting to learn more from Pilger about this phenomenon called “the Class War”, and in particular where it goes to, and what happens to it, when the Tories are out of office. But we must proceed.

To get the setting right and to conjure up the proper sense of occasion, John Pilger takes us to Chilham Castle, near Canterbury, in Kent where lives the thirteenth Viscount of Massereene and Ferrard who has, among other things of course, no less than nine names. The talents of this gentleman extend to salmon-netting, fox-hunting and giving mediaeval banquets. He has a favourite fairy story which begins “Once upon a time there were 750,000 jobless workers who ordered taxis to pick up their dole money and take them on to the betting shop” — and, perhaps, give the occasional mediaeval banquet?

Gathered at the Castle are the ginger group of the Tory Party known as the Monday Club. Every hoary old reactionary notion is trotted out from anti-contraception to anti-trade unionism. There is a lady present (we had better not call her just a woman!) who thinks the Rhodesian government is doing “splendid things for the natives” like “building them little houses”. At this point Enoch Powell joins the august gathering and a respectful hush falls while they listen to the learned phrases of their Guest of Honour. The Monday Club claim to have 34 MP's including a Cabinet Minister and that the decision to sell arms to South Africa was due to their pressure.

These political primitives somehow manage to delude themselves that they are our betters and feel destined to rule us. Jonathan Guinness, of the multi-millionaire brewing family, says:

 I want to see an end to the Welfare State as we know it now. I believe that people at the lower levels tend to be rather passive, and handouts stop them making an effort.

It is a cheek for men like Guinness to talk about “handouts” and “making an effort”. Everything he owns is a handout. What effort has he ever had to make? The “lower levels” to which he refers are people who have lived in slums, suffered from a retarding environment, mis-education and unemployment so that life has very little meaningful purpose for them (not a very praiseworthy achievement for capitalism!). Yet, however little effort the least able of these people makes it is greater than that of Guinness and his ilk. And any so-called hand-outs workers may receive come from the wealth produced by their class.

The Monday Club backwoodsmen forget the reasons capitalism developed the “welfare” state in the first place. A working class rife with tuberculosis, rickets and dental decay presents its ruling class with serious problems when recruiting an army in war-time, while in “peace” time employers need a minimum standard of efficiency from their workers in order to make more profits.

There is a lesson here for all advocates of reforms. Most of the trivial-enough gains, made on the boomtime swings, can be lost on the slump-time roundabouts. Nor is it the case that the ruthless men of right-wing Toryism will callously do things which no Labour government would stoop to. Capitalism, in its various phases of expansion and contraction, imposes quite narrow limits on the policies and actions of politicians and governments.

Just as in the 1930’s we saw the mocking irony of a Labour government cutting civil servants’ wages and preparing cuts in the dole-money, so in recent years it was they who first took milk away from school children and increased charges on the once vaunted Health Service. The Labour government also sold arms around the world, including South Africa. The Monday Club, for all its “belief in yesterday” (or, living in the past) and sympathy for the National Front, could also go no further than the prevailing winds of capitalism would take them.

There is nothing in capitalism for the working class, whoever runs it.

Harry Baldwin

Tell Me Lies (2004)

Book Review from the February 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Miller ed: Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq. Pluto Press £12.99

This volume contains 32 contributions from a wide variety of writers, which naturally means few arguments are developed at length and there is some overlap. A number of the pieces have appeared before, such as John Pilger's articles in the New Statesman.

It is probably not a surprise to learn that the physical attack on Iraq was preceded, accompanied and followed by a massive propaganda war. There were the notorious claims about Iraq's supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), claims which the mainstream media signally failed to expose as falsehoods. The view that Iraq constituted a threat to the rest of the world, largely by dint of having WMDs, was built up from at least 1997, despite the lack of real evidence for it. Even the CIA was pressured into producing reports that gave more support to the case for war.

Once the invasion had started, the propaganda machine went into overdrive, though under the more acceptable labels of “public diplomacy”' or “information support”. Both state and private media played their part; the BBC's Andrew Marr, for instance, reported that Baghdad had been captured “without a bloodbath”, despite the loss of thousands of civilian lives. The invasion force went to great lengths to ensure that only their perspective on the fighting was given proper airtime. Many reporters were stationed at the US Central Command in Qatar, where they could do little but listen to, and pass on, the official line as delivered in press conferences at which hostile or even sceptical questions were firmly discouraged.

A major development in this war was the use of “embedded” reporters, who travelled with invading forces, supposedly sharing the same dangers and so identifying with the soldiers they were accompanying. This inevitably meant that they toed the official line, often presenting a sanitised view of war, in which Iraqi casualties were minimised and all emphasis was put on the prospects for a successful (from the US-UK standpoint) outcome. In contrast were the so-called “unilateral” journalists, who were more independent, in some cases reporting from Baghdad while it was under attack. The US stressed the protection that they could offer to the “embeds”, while the unilaterals could enjoy no such advantages. In fact, two embedded American media workers were killed during the war, as were at least fifteen other journalists. In some cases, media centres and hotels housing reporters were bombed by US forces - probably intentionally, given that their positions and status were too well-known for all these incidents to be accidents.

Of course, there are other forms of government and ruling class influence on the media than naked physical threat. Many media bosses are themselves extremely wealthy capitalists (think of Rupert Murdoch), so their companies naturally present a pro-corporate power position. In the US, owners of radio stations supported the war as a thank you to the government for its deregulation of the radio industry, from which they'd benefited. The US media adopted a jingoistic attitude during the war, but the UK media were not quite that bad (and it is only fair to record that Channel 4 News was the most critical in its reporting).

The Iraq invasion was a media war in that many of the prominent public images of it were mere media stunts. Remembering the toppling of Saddam's statue? Well, it was American troops who pulled the statue down, and a few handpicked Iraqis were depicted rejoicing. In other cases, the reporting was noticeable for what was not said. Much attention was given to Iraqis looting museums and hospitals after the fall of Baghdad, but there was hardly any reference to the fact that US troops made sure that the Oil Ministry building, with its important records of oil exploration and so on, was made secure.

One good thing which emerges from the book is the way that ordinary people are becoming less and less prepared to swallow the lies emanating from governments and their propaganda machines.

Paul Bennett

The capitalist state (1999)

From the June 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The state is based on minority rule. It was set up and exists in opposition to the majority and so can never be truly democratic.

The current state is owned and run by the kleptocratic class of capitalists, a tiny proportion of the population. Thus their state is predicated upon an opposition between the desire of the masses and the will of their clique. Their state is set up against the majority, because they can never be a majority. Their ideas, thinking, and tactics, are all those of a tiny minority. Could you ever imagine a counter-demonstration by capitalists: men in sharp pin-stripe suits converging on Trafalgar Square, chanting through loud-hailers "They say fight back, we say cut back! Tax the poor and make them pay!" It would never happen. It is not, and cannot ever be their way of making politics.

One of the ways in which the capitalists have managed to control the vast network of offices and bureaucracies that is the modern state has been through ensuring that most of the jobs are not up for democratic election. This has been managed through the power of appointment, and through the Public Appointments Unit (formerly Bureau), which was in fact secret until 1975. Before then, it had vetted and selected those "eligible" to serve as appointees of the state. This effectively meant that office-holders could be moulded to suit the requirements of the state and its masters. Cold War ideology strengthened this selection process, through using the threat of enemy "agents" as an internal control device (just as, on the other side, Stalin used "petit-bourgeois" and "Trotskyite" "traitors".) 

Unelected appointees

Nowadays, as a result of the Nolan Committee, the Public Appointments Unit publishes lists of appointees and selected details about them. A quick glance at the statistics suffices to show the scale of the operation. The Department of Social Security has 3,689 appointees listed by the PAU, the Department of Trade and Industry has 632, all of them placed upon committees or planning groups with significant powers over many people. Whether the appointments are paid or unpaid, they still carry a deal of responsibility, power and status with them, such that many wish to find themselves in such positions; thus not only can a government select the people that run the country. They can use this capacity to buy servility and toadying from such as want those posts.

The ultimate expression of this power of patronage and status, is the entire honours system, with the House of Lords at its apex, as was recently pointed out by those few MPs in parliament with a genuine commitment to democracy, when they proposed an Amendment to the Lord's Bill to have an elected second chamber. This debate is sure to show the real intents of the vast majority of power-seekers, when they vote to allow the government to retain the power of patronage to appoint people to the Lords. Tony Blair has already shown his zeal in using such powers of patronage, elevating Simon and Sainsbury so that he could have them in his government, and employing Lord Jenkins to conduct the commission into Proportional Representation. The existence of a non-elected second chamber means that only a minority of Parliament are elected; the ending of hereditary peerage appears to be more about ensuring that future governments can exercise power and patronage over the second chamber, rather than any genuine concern for democracy.

The way in which power is exercised through the executive's patronage, rather than through the democratic control of either parliament or the electorate, was brought out in an article in a recent issue of Private Eye (22 January), entitled "Return of the Whigs—or How the SDP (defunct) and Lib Dems (17 percent of the vote) got into Government". It featured a diagram, showing the relationships between several past and present members of the Lib Dems/SDP, (including Lord Jenkins) and how they all had privileged access to Whitehall, via Peter Mandelson, and a particularly powerful lobbying firm. This illustrates the direction of "the Blair Project", of using his Prime Minister's power of patronage to elevate people of like political opinions into positions of power, and side-line his reliance upon the elected party in Parliament. This tendency alone keeps power concentrated into the hands of a tiny few.

Elite selection

The campaigning leftwing journalist John Pilger has written about another feature of undemocratic practice in the existing state in his New Statesman column (16 October, 13 November, 27 November, 8 January). He discussed "The Successor Generation", a social networking group established by (among others) Rupert Murdoch, Sir James Goldsmith, Howard J. Pew (a right wing oil millionaire) and the Institute for Policy Research (founded by William Casey, a former head of the CIA). The aim of the group being (according to Ronald Reagan who presided over the 1983 launch at the Oval Office) "to have [Britain and America] work together on defence and security issues". Its foundation was due to the rising distrust of NATO in Britain among Labourite members, and its aim was to include the up and coming stars, the leaders of the future, among its "alumni".

Five members of Blair's original cabinet were alumni of the Successor Generation: George Robertson (now Defence Secretary, toadyingly supporting the Atlanticist line on attacks in Iraq and anywhere else that displeases America); Mo Mowlam (Northern Ireland Secretary, and Blair's Campaign manager for the Labour leadership contest); Peter Mandelson (formerly Blair's right hand man, and Minister for everything); Baroness Symons (Foreign Office Minister, up to her neck in the Sandline affair); Chris Smith (Culture Secretary) together with Jonathon Powell (Blair's Chief of Staff). All of these now powerful people were wined and dined by the Successor Generation, and made contacts there. It is not just politicians that are alumni, a number of BBC journalists, including Newsnight's Evan Davis, attend Successor Generation functions.

To highlight the Successor Generation is not to cry conspiracy theory, or allege corruption. Indeed, those that attend scoff at any idea that they may be being influenced by these little soirées. The point is, however, that it provides a framework, deliberately constructed, so that people who are going to be "the leaders of the future" (a highly undemocratic concept from the start) can network, form bonds and an identity, and get to know each other on a personal level, be friends. Evan Davies, to reject that any notion it is a sinister organisation, pointed out that British Airways back it and that this was a "respectable company". This is precisely the mind-set the organisation wishes to promote: that this is all just the harmless socialising provided by the rich and powerful, whose intent is benign. What once was accomplished solely through Eton and Oxbridge and other institutions of class privilege now has to be remade through private funding of millionaires—elite creation.

The involvement of William Casey with the Successor Generation hints at another form of elite control in the capitalist state, the secret agencies. The CIA currently has a budget of some $28 billion, a small fraction of which was able to be diverted to help the Successor Generation and like organisations in US client states. Likewise, the British secret services have long been a means of watching and controlling the political scene. MI5 agents have been implicated in the funding of fascist groups and Loyalist terrorists. Being secret, beyond accountability, and being powerful, they can form a state within a state, to unsubtly correct things when the usual systems of power run out of the elite's control.

Will of the majority

All of this goes to show how desperately the kleptocratic masters in this country try to keep mass involvement and democracy out, so that only the fig-leaf of parliamentary democracy exists to cover it over and give the state a semblance of democracy. It has been thus ever since the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, and the institution of the Bank of England and the National Debt, which combined to exercise control over the state (a role now performed by the IMF). Where once in a feudal state the warrior class kept power through warlike duties, the capitalist class exercises power in their state through ownership of money. The working class, likewise, must exercise its power through its sole asset—its work, and its collectivity. The tiny elite collectively own the state through money, the working class must take control of the state through democracy.

The form of the capitalist state is inherently predicated upon minority rule, and to re-create such a state as part of the workers' revolution would be to re-create minority rule. The one-man rule and dictatorship of the Soviet Union was not what Marx understood by the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat". For him this simply meant the dominance of the working class, the unequivocal, absoluteness of telling the capitalists "NO! that is no longer your factory!", "NO! Your money is now worthless!", an action that must be carried out by the will of the vast majority.

Since workers are only workers by dint of their positioned opposition to capital, and the masses only masses by dint of their opposition to an elite, the instant the working class performs that revolution, abolishes the minority state, abolishes capital, it abolishes itself as a class, and all classes along with it. Creating a new state upon the same lines as the capitalist state would only result in re-creating a ruling elite; which is precisely what happened in Russia. The working class is the agent of socialism not because of some objective superiority, or because of economic power, but because it is the class that undoes class—the negation of class and so of the state.

In a socialist world the whole population would be the state—so the state as such would cease to exist, replaced with the free, co-operative, democratic association of human beings. Hence the battle cry of socialists is "to convert the ballot box from a means of fraud into a means of liberation", and not to perpetuate the fraud of the democratic state in the name of a so-called "workers' state" ruling over the real individual lives of real members of the working class.

Pik Smeet